for of all disagreeable people, a Western Yankee is, I think, the most
disagreeable. Such an one never improves, but adheres strictly to the
customs of their native place, no matter how many years have passed
since they lived there, or how great the march of improvement may have
been. In these days of railroads and telegraphs there is no reason why
your mother should not be up to the times. Her neighbors are, it seems,
and I have met quite as cultivated people from beyond the Rocky
Mountains as I have even seen in Boston."

This was a great admission for Mrs. Van Buren, who verily believed there
was nothing worth her consideration out of Boston unless it were a few
families in the immediate vicinity of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.
She was bent upon making Richard uncomfortable, and could at the moment
think of no better way of doing it than contrasting his mother's "way"
with those of her neighbors. Occasionally Aunt Barbara put her feeble
oar into the surging tide, hoping to check, even if she could not subdue
the angry waters; but she might as well have kept silent save that
Richard understood and appreciated her efforts to spare him as much as
possible. Mrs. Van Buren was not to be stopped, and at last, when she
had pretty fully set before Richard his own and his mother's
delinquencies, she turned fiercely on her sister, demanding if she had
not said "so and so" with regard to Ethie's home in the West. Thus
straitened, Aunt Barbara replied:

"Things did strike me a little odd at Ethie's, and I don't well see how
she could be very happy there. Mrs. Markham is queer--the queerest
woman, if I must say it, that I ever saw, though I guess there's a good
many like her up in Vermont, where she was raised, and if the truth was
known, right here in Chicopee, too; and I wouldn't wonder if there were
some queer ones in Boston. The place don't make the difference; it's the
way the folks act."

This she said in defense of the West generally. There were quite as nice
people there as anywhere, and she believed Mrs. Markham meant to be kind
to Ethie; surely Richard did, only he did not understand her. It was
very wrong to lock her up, and then it was wrong in Ethie to marry him,
feeling as she did. "It was all wrong every way, but the heaviest
punishment for the wrong had fallen on poor Ethie, gone, nobody
knew where."

It was not in nature for Aunt Barbara to say so much without crying, and
her tears were dropping fast into